That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you’re playing with him or against him.

The Benet junior goalkeeper is quietly putting together a solid season in his first year as a varsity starter. The Redwings, who improved to 9-1-2 overall and 5-0-0 in the East Suburban Catholic Conference with Monday’s 2-0 win over Carmel, have allowed 10 goals.

Nine of those goals came in matches against Fremd, Naperville North and Neuqua Valley, and the Redwings tied the latter two.

“There’s things I could improve upon, but I played pretty well,” Gould said following his shutout of Carmel.

Gould made six saves as well as a few difficult punch-outs against the Corsairs, who had scored 30 goals in their previous five games. It was Gould’s fifth clean sheet of the year and came on a day when the Redwings were without star center-back Bennett Curtis, who is out with a bruised shin.

But ask Gould how he’s playing this season, and you’ll get a surprising response.

“Not as good as I could,” Gould said. “I definitely have a lot more I can do.”

Such sentiment brings a wry smile to the face of Benet coach Sean Wesley, who said before the season that Gould, who played sparingly while backing up Konrad Bayer in 2015, would have started for many other teams last season.

“He’s so good technically that when a little thing goes wrong that most people don’t notice, he’s going to beat himself up about it. But he kept a clean sheet in a game like this and made a save or two that were pretty big.”

Gould isn’t the biggest or strongest goalkeeper, and he doesn’t appear to be fast, but his technical ability enables him to make the difficult seem routine.

“His positioning is good,” Wesley noted. “When he’s playing well and moving his feet, he’s in the right spot and he’s making the job look easy and that’s 80 percent of the battle, right?”

Gould said he feels more comfortable now that he’s the starter.

“It’s nice that I get a good run of games to get in a groove,” he said. “Having Konrad there last year helped me improve while we were pushing each other all year. But now this year is good because I can get in a rhythm.”Dealing with adversityThe Redwings’ success on the field this season has been tempered by sobering events off the field.

Longtime Benet athletic director Gary Goforth, a fixture at home soccer games, recently returned to work following the unexpected death of his daughter, Heather, on August 25.

Heather Goforth, a 2005 Benet graduate, was 29 when she died from a sudden illness. Over 2,000 people attended the wake on August 29 and school was cancelled so students could attend the funeral the following day.

The Redwings lost 3-0 to Fremd on the day of the wake but have since embarked on a 10-game unbeaten streak.

“I don’t remember that string of games very well (in the aftermath), but it’s hard for people that are really important to this athletic program,” Gould said. “When they’re going through hard times, everyone seems to feel a little bit (in a daze).”

But the tragedy seems to have brought an already close-knit school together. Certainly that was true for the soccer team.

“I feel like it did (make us closer),” sophomore forward Franklin Rutkowski said. “It definitely brought us together, and as we were going through that we were playing more together and that brought us even closer.”

Gary Goforth attended his first soccer game September 22, a 3-0 Redwings win over West Chicago, and was at Monday’s win over Carmel.

Also back is junior varsity coach Bob Gros, who underwent major cancer surgery in August.

“It’s good to see some of our teachers and people that have been around the school come back and watch us because it shows that they’re obviously out here to enjoy themselves,” Gould said. “It’s definitely good for them. It’s great to see them out here.”In the driver’s seatThere are still four league games left, but Benet’s win over Carmel was the last major obstacle the Redwings needed to clear en route to the ESCC championship. The victory, coming on a day when the Redwings had to play several players out of position, cannot be underestimated.

“Potentially huge,” Wesley said. “Not to have Bennett Curtis going in potentially our hardest conference game of the year, with no warm-up game in between and no time to figure it out (is tough).

“We think he’s an All-State center-back and to lose that guy, right before you’ve got to their kind of athletes, is concerning. But that being said, we have great kids that stepped up.

“We started the game with Connor (Mote), who normally plays attacking-mid for us, at center-back and then we moved things around a little bit. Devin Martini played in the back, he normally plays in the midfield. Nick Renfro, our freshman, is kind of our utility player who plays everywhere. He did well.”

“We had a lot of guys stepping up, playing positions that they normally wouldn’t play.”

The Redwings have ESCC games remaining against Marist, Notre Dame, Marian and Saint Viator.

The first two figure to be the toughest of the four, but Wednesday’s game against Marist is at home and Benet has routed Notre Dame 6-1 and 5-0 the past two seasons. Still, the Redwings are not overconfident.